Exquisite timing. Mrs Elizabeth Windsor of SW1 feels traduced by Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper. She takes her case to the Independent Press Standards Organisation just as this body – backed by Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, inter alia – struggles for complete credibility while a rival regulator snaps at its heels. What do you say about a Sun front page claiming “Queen backs Brexit”? You condemn it and insist on an upfront correction. But that’s the easy part.
It’s easy because there’s nothing in the Sun’s body-text report that justifies those three lead words in big, booming type. If taken at face value they, at the most, provide secondhand evidence of a couple of conversations up to five years old in the midst of eurozone crisis – when no referendum had been agreed and “Brexit” might as well have been some new patent loo cleaner.
Clause one of the Ipso code says: “The press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text.” Thank you and goodnight, m’lud.
But now, if Ipso is brave, it may need to push deeper into the thickets of principle and practice. For clause 14 of the same code says “journalists have a moral obligation to protect confidential sources of information”. And the Bun yarn rests entirely on two such pillars: a “highly reliable” and “senior” source who apparently heard HM hold forth on Europe after a privy council lunch in 2011, and a separate “parliamentary source” (ie an MP) who noted her “venom” and “emotion” about EU affairs at an undated Palace reception.
What would Margaret Sullivan, the fierce public editor at the New York Times, say about such sourcing? No need to guess. The Times’s own code says simply that “anonymity is a last resort”, but that doesn’t satisfy Sullivan or supreme editor Dean Baquet any longer. “Two front-page, anonymously sourced stories in a few months have required editors’ notes that corrected key elements – elements that were integral enough to form the basis of the headlines in both cases,” according to Sullivan. “That’s not acceptable for Times readers or for the paper’s credibility, which is its most precious asset.”
She recognises a situation, after earlier debacles, where anonymity became the single biggest cause of reader complaints. She believes that “the paper needs to show far more scepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny – at every level of the process”. New, tighter guidelines are in the works.
But that’s over there. Over here, Tony Gallagher at the Sun declares: “We serve our readers, not the elite who might be upset at what we’ve written. We are completely confident that the Queen’s views were expressed exactly as we’ve outlined in both the headline and the story.” Which doesn’t work, as we’ve seen, in terms of a headline that goes way beyond the story beneath – but also relies on two “impeccable sources”.
Fickle fingers of suspicion inevitably point first at Michael Gove, justice secretary and a leader of the Leave campaign. Nick Clegg and Tom McNally, who were with Gove at the Privy Council lunch, say the Sun stuff is “nonsense”; another attendee, Cheryl Gillan, then Welsh secretary, protests she didn’t leak anything. But Mrs Windsor is making a very high-profile complaint of false witness. So why the shrinking violets? Gallagher is a brave and battling journalist, as he showed masterminding the Telegraph’s scoops on MPs’ expenses. Couldn’t that second “parliamentary source” of his provide chapter and verse? Why is Tony threatening new revelations when we need to be told much more about the old ones?
A story that puts names, quotes and dates to the Queen’s views on Brexit is well worth its headline space. A story that may be just more stirring of the Brexit mud – as witnessed on both referendum sides – isn’t worth page 97. Unreliable sources claim this or that. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?
But see how the affair now sinks into the ooze of more sources – Whitehall sources, “friends of Mr Gove” etc – so that the original tale (however fervently denied) becomes accepted wisdom. It’s the tale of Cameron and the Bullingdon pig – via another misty, vanishing source – all over again.
Whistleblowing sources need all the protection that clause 14 can give them. Sources routinely peddling Westminster chatter are quite different. They are more than a cause for Ipso rebuke. As Sullivan says, they’re foes of understanding, belief and trust.